Are You Ready for Some (Fantasy) Football?

The 2nd annual Hackers Only Fantasy Football League is back! The HO-FFL is a great way for us IT security professionals to enjoy some time together outside of the workplace. This season we have some of the leading web application security companies represented, along with AppSec consultants and users of the products.

Prior to our inaugural season last year, I discovered a bug in the Yahoo! Fantasy Football mobile app, where session tokens that would never expire and allow man in the middle attacks to hijack them – to be used to their advantage against their rivals. The bug has since been fixed by Yahoo!.

This season is fired up and ready to start. The teams were drafted on Friday and now we eagerly await the start of the season tomorrow. We have an amazing collection of bright minds in the InfoSec industry that will battle head to head this season for the inaugural trophy.

Along with myself, we have several returning players

Billy’s Team – Billy Austin from iScan Online’s returns as our defending champion. He just so happened to draft the highest scoring player from 2013, Peyton Manning. Billy happens to be my first opponent. I’m hoping that Peyton doesn’t repeat his Week 1 performance from last year when he threw for 7 touchdowns against Baltimore.

Tomball Cowboys – Michael Farnum from competitor HP and founder of my favorite local conference, HouSecCon. Farnum’s draft grade was the worst, and asks’ did “Tomball Cowboys Throw the Draft on Purpose?”

Megatron – David French of Risk I/O who decided to chase Farnum down toward the bottom with his grade stating that “Megatron Obviously Hates Winning”.

Boca Steelers – Alan Shimel currently of The CISO Group and formerly of StillSecure. And before that Alan was hanging with Al Gore helping to create the Internet….and before that he was with Edison harnessing electricity.

Orange County Bears – Dmitriy Kashitsyn the Director of Engineering at NT OBJECTives. Dmitriy made me worry during the draft when he asked “What does QB mean?”. Hopefully he busts out his ‘Football for Dummies’ book quick!

We will have a few opportunities to get together and share drinks and catch up (or smack talk) at events such as OWASP AppSec USA (9/17-9/19), HouSecCon (10/16) and RSA 2014 (2/24/2015-2/28/2015). These are great chances to see familiar faces and build upon new relationships built over the bond of Fantasy Football!